'Life Without People' is not just for show

The Sears Tower fell like some ailing side-show giant with a broken back.

It collapsed in pieces before finally crashing earthward, to abandoned Chicago streets overgrown with forests, crawling with bears. But all the people had disappeared.

And without humans to tend it, Chicago wasn't "Urbs in Horto" anymore. It was just plain old wild Horto.

Paris, too, the Eiffel Tower cracking to the ground, and Seattle, the Space Needle falling, and New York, the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge rotting, snapping, all of it plunging into the East River in the History Channel special "Life After People."

There was Horto everywhere, Horto relentlessly triumphant, as befits seamless mass televised celebrations of the sacrament of Earth Day.

My sons are thrilled about the new History Channel series about what happens to the Earth when all of the messy humans finally disappear. Given the magic of cable TV, we began at the beginning, clicking on the original special that was broadcast last year.

"This will be great," said one boy. "Shhh," said the other, both assuming their positions before our new TV.

Our boys are 7th-graders now, and I can still remember the appeal of apocalyptic sci-fi when I was their age, though mine involved the Soviets, the bomb and a few savage tribes left to remake the world. Happily, the other tribe was always overpopulated with beautiful young women in deerskins who looked like Tuesday Weld, their curvy moms with plucked eyebrows like Sophia Loren.

My sons don't know from duck-and-cover in school. They do know about computer graphics. And "Life After People" was absolutely fascinating, and scary, the Earth folding over everything left behind.

With humans mysteriously gone poof -- perhaps they'd been gathered heavenward, or simply vanished through a cloning experiment gone wrong, the high media priests of genetic science gone along with the rest -- the Earth reclaimed itself.

No potatoes. No oranges on trees, but Boston ivy everywhere.

In cities, lights began shutting off within 36 hours, with no humans to feed fossil fuels into generators. House pets began licking moisture leaking from dead refrigerators before going feral. Engineers explained that iron is irresistibly called back to the earth from where it was mined. Without proper maintenance, the spines of buildings and bridges rust up to begin the great return. Buildings collapse, become hills. Seeds take root. Water finds its way again.

It crumbles away without a single poet left to remember. Apparently, the poets were treated just as cavalierly as bureaucrats, morticians, first basemen, politicians and fry cooks.

The curators were mournful, since all record of human thought would disappear, from The Apology of Socrates to People magazine. So I pictured Jane Austen's "Emma," both the books and the film with Gwyneth Paltrow bubbling up, "I Love Lucy," religious texts and commentaries, "The Godfather," Cormac McCarthy, all of it gone.

But the ones who were enraptured were the biologists, so excited about mountain lions returning to cities and rhinos escaping from the zoos, and seas teeming with fish.

One of the commentators was Ray Coppinger, the eminent biologist of Hampshire College, whom I had the pleasure to speak with years ago about his amazing work introducing the Kangal, the great Turkish guardian dogs, into the American West and Africa to curb livestock predation.

"Then these vines start up, the vines have little branches," Coppinger said on the program. "It would be nice if the vegetation produces fruit or something that was edible. You'd have to have some source of energy for animals."

On screen, a skyscraper was shown, the windows all broken out, the plant life everywhere, birds nesting in trees, cats hunting the canopy, evolving into something like flying squirrels.

"Then you would get this vertical ecosystem in there, and animals, birds, nesting in there, things hunting in there. You could have snakes there," Coppinger said.

Like the other biologists, there was whimsy on his face, his fingers were intertwined as he smiled.

"Is he happy?" one boy asked. No, I said, he's an analyst, considering all the possibilities.

That building on TV could have been any office building. Forgive me, but today, I can't help thinking of it as a newspaper office: without people.